Every 8th of March, women across the world remember and celebrate the struggles of women in the past and in the present against patriarchy, against authoritarian regimes, against violence, against neo-liberal market fundamentalism that exploits our labour, silences our voices, privatises our public services and deregulates our market. The International Women’s Day celebrates the power of women’s movements in advancing progressive policy changes and the solidarity actions that women have taken, from when women took to the streets for the right to vote and hold public office, when women went on strike to demand equal pay and to when women have celebrated other inspirational women in their lives.

Determined to humiliate women’s struggles and movements, the governments of Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam will gather on the very 8th of March 2018 in Santiago, Chile to ink the so-called Comprehensive and Progressive Trans Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) Agreement that is neither progressive nor feminist.

The CPTPP, just like its predecessor the TPP, will drive a race to the bottom, with women at the bottom. It will promote labour competition and women’s low wages as a source of competitive advantage for corporations. It will threaten women’s access to public services through the reduction of tariffs that deprives governments of important revenue, the requirement that foreign corporations should be able to compete for public services, and the existence of investor protection mechanisms that discourage governments from reversing failed privatisation to introducing new regulations to increase public access or benefits to essential, basic public services. When governments cuts public social services such as healthcare, women’s health is usually deemed expendable while they are expected to provide the unpaid care work to make up for it. Based on the ‘national treatment’ principle, CPTPP also require countries to treat foreign companies in the same way they treat local ones, pushing women, who are the majority of small scale, subsistence farmers, to compete against huge agro-businesses. With the tightened intellectual property rights, it will be a “big wins” only for the large seed companies with legal power to prohibit seed sharing amongst farmers and require farmers to pay royalties for seeds for up to 20 or 25 years. Women, the custodian of seed, food and traditional knowledge who depends on the sharing of seed and other inputs from each other will be greatly harmed by the CPTPP, forced out of their farms and the local economy.

More outrageously, the CPTPP maintains the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), a mechanism that allows for foreign corporations to reach across border and sue governments in unaccountable international tribunals if governments pass any laws, policies and practices that infringes on the corporations rights to profit. Corporations have used ISDS to avoid paying taxes, to undermine policies made in public interests such as health policy, to reverse affirmative action policies, to avoid obligations to protect the environment, to punish governments that introduces clean energy or to reverse failed privatisation.

We, women’s rights organisations and allies are outraged that governments have decided to not only proceed with the CPTPP despite all its criticism and fundamental lack of public, citizen’s review, but to sign away women’s human rights on the same day that we celebrate it. The very same hard-fought rights that women’s organisations and activists have fought for centuries, only to put powers and privilege in the hands of large multinational corporations and the wealthiest few. It is a breach to the very fundamental principle of social contract that sovereignty comes from the people.

So many of the governments which are part of the CPTPP have talked the rhetoric of women’s human rights and gender equality, and some of them still do. The preambular mention of gender equality in the CPTPP was another such rhetoric meant to disguise the glaring absence of even a symbolic and ineffectual gender chapter and the unabashed entrenchment of corporate power and privilege. If countries in the CPTPP are genuinely committed to women’s human rights and gender equality they must not proceed with the CPTPP.

We urge the governments of CPTPP to break the disguised assumption that opposition to trade agreements equates to nationalism and a rejection of accountable multilateralism. Instead, our time requires the global community to urgently envision and chart out a different trade model that is based on solidarity economy and human rights, to protect the people and the planet, redistribute power, resources and wealth between men and women, and between rich and poor and between countries.

* We are only accepting endorsements from organisations based in any/all of the CPTPP 11 countries (Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam). Endorsements from any organisations not from these 11 countries will be excluded. For endorsements, please sign here.

Deadline to sign the statement has ended. Scroll below to see the list of endorsers.